Kobo in Conversation

Michael Tamblyn spoke with Miriam Toews, author of many novels including A Complicated Kindness, All My Puny Sorrows, and Women Talking, to name just a few. Her latest book is a memoir called, A Truce That Is Not Peace. Spurred by the question "why do you write?", posed by a distressingly persistent literary festival organizer, it's a work of nonfiction that delves into the author's feelings around the deaths by suicide of both her father and her sister.

Miriam Toews on her new memoir, and the surprising truth of good comedy

Nathan Maharaj spoke with the novelist Charlotte McConaghy. Her latest book is Wild Dark Shore. It's the story of the Salt family, the stewards of a vast seed bank on a remote island that's in danger of being washed over by rising sea levels. As they're making the hard decisions about what can be saved in the course of their evacuation, a vicious storm tears across the island and leaves a woman washed up on the shore—and she's alive.

Charlotte McConaghy found fear on the Wild Dark Shore

Nathan Maharaj spoke with the Oscar-nominated filmmaker and journalist Julian Brave NoiseCat. He co-directed the 2024 documentary Sugarcane which investigated abuses at a residential school in western Canada. He is also the author of a new book called We Survived the Night: An Indigenous Reckoning. It's about his dad, and also his upbringing, and a mythical character named Coyote.

Julian Brave Noisecat set out to tell a story in the trickster tradition

Nathan Maharaj spoke with novelist Mona Awad. Her debut book, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl was a Giller Prize finalist. Its follow-up Bunny was set in an Ivy League creative writing program and blended horror and suspense with wicked satire. We Love You, Bunny is her fifth novel, and it's a return to that creative writing program, revisiting the story through the perspectives of characters who apparently want to set the record straight but end up pulling us even further down this dark and twisting rabbit hole.

Mona Awad on returning to the world of Bunny

Hosts Michael Tamblyn and Nathan Maharaj caught up on a landmark legal decision about books and AI, the perils of bookstore merch, plus a whole lot more.

This episode covers:

• Anthropic AI v. Authors
  • and Authors v. Apple
• How Powell's Books' new mugs got them into hot water
• Barnes & Noble buying Books Inc.
• C-suite changes at Simons & Schuster and Harper UK
• A novel approach to creative writing this November

Somehow, neither of them mentioned a specific book this time. They've been spoken to and have promised to do better in the future.

Find other Booktalking episodes here

And all our author interviews are at kobo.com/conversation

Michael Tamblyn spoke with journalist Brian Stewart, whose career spanned decades, covering the US-Iraq Gulf War, famine in Ethiopia, and countless other historical events for CBC and NBC. He tells us about all of it—including what was going on in his life off-camera—in a new book: On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent.

Brian Stewart reports on the golden age of being a foreign correspondent

Host Nathan Maharaj spoke with Antonio Michael Downing, author of the 2021 memoir Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming, as well as the illustrated children's book Stars in My Crown. For just about a year now he's also been the host of CBC's The Next Chapter, where every week he talks to authors (and once in a while an opinionated bookseller) about books they want people to pay attention to. He joined us to talk about his first novel: Black Cherokee. It's the story of Ophelia Blue Rivers, a girl growing up in South Carolina where her mixed ancestry leaves her struggling for acceptance amidst the Cherokee community where her grandmother raised her.

Antonio Michael Downing's literary journey into the South

Host Michael Tamblyn spoke with novelist Scott Alexander Howard, winner of the 2025 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and author of The Other Valley. It's the story of Odile Ozanne, a young girl who lives in a small village in a valley. In the next valley over, in the west, there is an identical village where events from 20 years ago are taking place, and in the valley to the east there is another village where it's 20 years in the future. Occasionally, and under the strictest controls and in a disguise rendering them unidentifiable, people will visit the other valleys, looking forward, or backward in time.

One day, visitors from the east—that is, from the future—are recognized by Odile, and she has to carry on pretending she hasn't seen what she knows she saw.

Scott Alexander Howard on the border-crossings between present and past

Host Nathan Maharaj spoke with novelist Rob Franklin. His debut novel Great Black Hope is about a young man, named Smith, who gets arrested for cocaine possession on his way home from a party at the end of an oppressively hot New York summer. Smith is Black, and he's queer; he's also a Stanford graduate and his family back in Atlanta is, as they say, not without means. As Smith's court date looms and he enters treatment for addiction, he's grieving the sudden and tragic death of a friend.

Rob Franklin's upwardly-mobile, downwardly-spiraling Great Black Hope

This past spring Kobo held an event for employees called KoboCon. It was an opportunity for the staff of Kobo to share interesting things they're working on and some big ideas they're grappling with. One of those big ideas was how the information ecosystem affects readers, writers, and individuals coming together at work, so we brought in expert explainer and debunker Timothy Caulfield to talk about it through the lens of his latest book The Certainty Illusion: What You Don't Know and Why It Matters. While we take a little break for the summer, we're bringing you that on-stage conversation now.

Timothy Caulfield and The Certainty Illusion - Live at KoboCon 2025!